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Tuesday, 7 October 2008

Haddock throws a wobbly

It may be seem heartless in the present climate, but I do wonder whether the collapse of the financial system might not have some long-term benefits.Firstly, if you’re reading this and just been made redundant and you are, sorry - were, a hedge fund manager, a derivatives trader, a short seller, or any of the other strange people who do, sorry - used to do, exciting things with my money in big shiny offices, then GET OVER IT. You had your day in the sun. There are plenty of other people who are going to be affected by the fall-out from this crisis more deserving of my limited sympathy. Play roulette with your own money Gordon Gecko by all means, but if you do it with ours then don’t expect any sympathy when it goes tits up.The tragedy of this latest huge cock-up is that of the ordinary Joe/Jo whose pensions, savings and jobs are fast disappearing before his/her disbelieving eyes. To you I apologise for what follows.Tout d’abord, once the dust has settled we might just remember that we are not all here on a free ride to consume as much as we can without any thought for the consequences. One of the huge ironies of this debacle is that as the very fabric of our capitalist big top starts to come asunder and the sparkly suited trapeze artists who amazed us with their daring financial somersaults start to plummet headlong into the sawdust, so we will emerge blinking from our reverie to realise that…bugger…the planet’s f*cked as well.

Without the distractions of endless new toys we might just grow up a little bit and start to think of something other than our own endless self-gratification. Without the money around to buy a new flat screen TV every six months or to replace the mobile because the camera (the camera for f*ck's sake) is only 6 megapixels or to fly to a new Euro city every weekend for a blast we might start to see that all this comes at a cost. That our circus was built on sand and now the music's stopped we're going to have to .... The Captain has exploded. Normal service will be resumed once he can find what's left of his personal pension.